Page 19 of Zorro

“I can’t?—”

“You ache for me in a place where your armor can’t hold me back.”

“Don’t touch…oh, God…” Her need flooded her. “…touch me. You beautiful man, please.”

“You think you don’t know me. Fuck you do. You know me, you want me, admit it.” He whispered against her skin, “You carry too much.” Then he kissed her ribs like a vow. “But you’re so good to love, Everly. So good.”

Rob’s words twisted into something exquisite, but all she heard was that she was too good for anyone to love. “You’re cruel and you lie,” she sobbed. “I won’t…I can’t?—”

His hair slid through her fingers like silk as he moved lower, lower, the flicker of his breath a warning before his tongue met her clit in a slow, torturous stroke.

“I’m going to go down on you,” he murmured in a voice rich with hunger. “I’m going to use my tongue to make you come, no matter how long it takes.” But she didn’t hear it in English. Somehow, it echoed in sinuous, musical Portuguese. “Vou fazer sexo oral em você e usar minha língua para fazer você gozar, não importa quanto tempo leve.”

Her hips lifted without command. Her hands fisted in the sheets of fire. Her mouth opened around a moan that fractured her shame.

But her body betrayed her. She arched into his mouth, into his heat, the wet scorch of his tongue driving her higher. Her legs shook. Her hips begged. Her soul burned. When she reached for him, when she pulled him over her, he turned into burning flesh. Male and perfect.

She whispered, “Oh please. Oh, please…”

He pushed in deep, thick, slow. She shattered around him, her body breaking open as he thrust all hard, penetrating need that burned from his exquisite erection to the heart within her, drowning her in black fire and glittering darkness. She let him, weeping with humiliation, moving and pulsing with pleasure.

She woke to her body’s release, violent, sweet, aching. Pleasure that throbbed like grief. Sweat slicked her bare skin. The sheets were gone. Her nightgown lay bunched on the floor. Her mouth parted on a sob as her chest heaved.

“Oh, God…Mateo…”

The echo of his dream-voice haunted her. You're so wet and soft and ready for me, I’m going to fuck you deep, so deep…

Tears spilled. You want me in a place where your armor can’t reach. She folded into herself, fetal, sobbing into her pillow, empty, throbbing, ashamed.

Mortified by how she’d treated him. Crushed by how much she still wanted him. Shattered by the memory of a man who had become both her desire and her torment.

Everly’s heart pounded in her chest, every beat a reminder of the disdain she’d carried for men like him, men who took her husband’s life, and had her dream reflected her turmoil of her perception, had all that fighting with him been more denial than conflict?

Now…

She dreamed of one.

Woke up climaxing over one.

She had to escape, not just from the heat, not just from the memory, from the man who had found a chink in her armor and was inside the walls, her emotions too jumbled to process, her heart and her head warring.

Best to avoid the whole mess completely. It would be a cold day in hell before she ever let herself near him again.

That ship had sailed all right, and she was still on board, sinking with it like the goddamn Titanic.

Hotel Lobby, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Everly padded across the polished floor, her conference packet bumping her hip, enjoying the lull of Portuguese murmurs, until the air changed. Thicker. Charged.

A low, teasing voice, then laughter rippled across the lobby, low, warm, threaded with affection and intimacy.

Her whole body reacted to the sound. Only one man affected her this way.

She looked up, the breath left her body, and time slowed down.

Zorro.

Casually dressed, which only made it worse. That man loose in any way was a danger to all females in the immediate vicinity. He moved like a tactical dancer, smooth and lethal. He was part of that gleaming one-point-six rule. Not only the shape of his face, but that V, the twenty-second letter of the alphabet, forming the “golden ratio” that was found in every perfectly portioned structure on the planet from the face of the Mona Lisa to the Great Pyramid of Giza.